UNCTAD´s role on climate change

Concerns about climate change have placed this threat to development prospects high on the international agenda, particularly in terms of its economic, trade and social impacts. UNCTAD´s main role in addressing this global challenge is to help developing countries master the trade and development implications and take advantage of emerging trade and investment opportunities.

A side event at the UNFCCC-COP20 Lima Climate Change Conference in December heard how commercializing goods derived from native biodiversity ("BioTrade") can be complemented by climate change mitigation and adaptation measures to unleash private sector engagement.

Experts meeting in Geneva will discuss how the sale and trade of goods sustainably harvested from forests, if expanded, may preserve stands of timber as carbon "sinks" and thus mitigate climate change.

The globe’s longest-lasting and largest cycle of ship building finally began to slow in 2012, UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport 2013 reveals, but the effects of overcapacity are still being felt. Shipping rates remained low, threatening firms’ profitability, even as the volume shipped last year increased by 4.3 per cent.

As a concrete follow-up to an UNCTAD expert meeting, a multidisciplinary academic paper entitled “A note on climate change adaptation for seaports: a challenge for global ports, a challenge for global society” has been published.​